Blaise Cendrars - Swiss itinerant poet: Sep. 1, 1887 - 1961…****JournalChristThere goes another year in which I haven’t thought about YouSince I wrote my penultimate poem EasterMy life has changed so muchBut I’m the same as everI still want to become a painterHere are the pictures that I’ve done displayed here on the walls this evening.They reveal to me strange perspectives into myself that make me think of You.ChristLifeSee what I’ve unearthedMy paintings make me uneasyI’m too passionateEverything is tinted orange.I’ve passed a sad day thinking about my friendsAnd reading my diaryChristA life crucified in this journal that I hold at arm’s length.WingspansRocketsFrenzyCriesLike a crashing aeroplaneThat’s me.PassionFireA serialDiaryNo matter how much you try to stay silentSometimes you have to cry outI’m the other wayToo sensitive

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September 1, 1875 - birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs (d. 1950), creator of Tarzan and literally dozens of other fantastic characters and worlds: science fiction, adventure and other pulp genres…

Joseph Wright of Derby: The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone, 1771 - oil on canvas (Derby Museum and Art Gallery)

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e. e. cummings, poet - died from a stroke, aged 67, on this day in 1962…****when god lets my body befrom each brave eye shall sprout a treefruit that dangles there

from the purpled world will dance uponbetween my lips which did sing

a rose shall beget the springthat maidens whom passion wastes

will lay between their little breastsmy strong fingers beneath the snow

into strenuous birds shall gomy love walking in the grass

their wings will touch with her faceand all the while shall my heart bewith the bulge and nuzzle of the sea

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Antonin Artaud, French playwright, actor and theorist of the theatre: (September 4, 1896 – 1948) - one of the great creative madmen of the 20th C.Photo: Man Ray, 1926

Antonin Artaud and Cécile Brusson in The Monk by Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis…

Older, wiser, madder Artaud…There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea shining in his head frightened people and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.(Photo: George Pastier)

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Oskar Schlemmer (September 4, 1888 – 1943) was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school.

Richard Wright (Sept. 4, 1908 – 1960) was the author of the 1940 novel Native Son which broke new ground for African-American literature…Photo: Bernie Aumuller

Richard Wright: Bandung, 1955

Richard Wright himself possessed a considerable talent as a photographer, as evidenced by The Beinecke Library’s large collection of photographs taken by Wright in Ghana, during his 1953 trip there…Richard Wright: Children in Ghana, 1953

Richard Wright acting in the role of Bigger Thomas (w. Gloria Madison as Bessie) in the film of his own novel, Native Son, 1951Photo: Gisele Freund, via The Beinecke____________

German film director Werner Herzog is 69 today, Sept. 5…Herzog is known for directing films about questing souls with impossible projects, shot under exacting circumstances…

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Jewish-Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, who later became a British subject was born September 5, 1905 (d. 1983).Koestler was proficient in math, philosophy, history and psychology; spoke several languges and wrote major works in 3 of them: Hungarian, German and English…

Robert Pirsig, known as the author of the cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), is 83 today!From ZAMM: A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. “The ancient Greeks,” I say, “who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?”Above: Photo from the road trip that Pirsig took with his family in 1968, and which got permutated into the novel - it’s Pirsig on the right, holding his boy Chris together with his friend John Sutherland…

Frederick Sommer (Sep. 7, 1905 – 1999) was an artist born in Italy and raised in Brazil. From 1931 he began experimenting with photography…Above: Fureurs, 1946

Frederick Sommer: Lee Nevin with Violin, 1963 - Vintage silver print

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Edith Sitwell was born Sep. 7, 1887 (d. 1964). She was a full-time Bohemian, muse, poet and critic…“I am not an eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” — E.S._______________________

The fantastically gifted and versatile actor Peter Sellers (Sep. 8, 1925 . 1980) excelled in comic parts such as Inspector Cluseau in the Pink Panther films, but also played with chilling intensity in dramatic parts for directors such as Stanley Kubrick (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove)…

Classic Pink Panther

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Merdre! Can’t find a good, new photo of Alfred Jarry (Sep. 8., 1873 - 1907 (tuberculosis)) - creator of King Ubu and inventor of the pseudoscience of ‘Pataphysics (“the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”)…So, we’ll go with his poster for the opening night of Ubu Roi, 1896.

In that mighty brush of hair To breathe out, like a diamond, The cry of Glory stifled there.

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Italian poet Cesare Pavese: Sep. 9, 1908 - 1950 (suicide by barbiturates)…****Cesare Pavese: Alter EgoFrom morning till evening he saw the tattooon his silky chest: a russet woman,lying concealed in the field of hair. Beneath there wassometimes chaos, she leapt up suddenly.The day passed in cursing and silence.If the woman were no tattoo butclung alive to his hairy chest, he’dcry out more loudly in the little cell.

Wide-eyed, he lay silently stretched on the bed.A deep sealike sigh swelledthe big solid bones in his body: he layas on a boat-deck. He rested heavily on the bedlike someone who on waking might jump up.His body, salted with spray, poured outsweat full of sunshine. The little cellwas not big enough for a single one of his glances.His hands showed he was thinking of the woman.

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The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy - Sep. 8, 1828 - 1910… Works include War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well as numerous other novels and novellas…“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” — Leo Tolstoy

H.D.’s increasingly female-centred poetry started out as inspired by Ezra Pound and the Imagist group’s aesthetics, but H.D. developed her own subject matter and formal language - largely to accomodate her explorations of bisexual and lesbian love relations, pacifism, psychological trauma, etc.

The cornel-buds are still white,but shadows dartfrom the cornel-roots—black creeps from root to root,each leafcuts another leaf on the grass,shadow seeks shadow,then both leafand leaf-shadow are lost.

(Photo via The Beinecke, c. 1916)

H.D. acting in the film Borderline (1930), which featured H.D. and Paul Robeson in the lead roles. The film was created by The POOL Group which consisted of H.D.’s male lover, Kenneth Macpherson, and her lesbian partner, Bryher, and H.D. herself…

H.D.: Notes on Thought and Vision, first item… (1919)

H.D. was also a patient of Sigmund Freud, undergoing analysis with him in Vienna in the 1930s in large part to help her work through her feeling of loss in the aftermath of WWI… She published the correspondence between her and Freud in the volume Tribute to Freud (1956)…

Above: Freud in his studio with his chow-chow, Jofi

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French thinker Georges Bataille: Sep. 10, 1897 - 1962…

A theorist of eroticism, deviance and the abjectal, Bataille began his career as a writer and philosopher as an adherent of Surrealism, but soon parted ways with Breton. Bataille also wrote erotic fiction:

“I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.” — Georges Bataille (Story of the Eye)

Adorno’s famous post-WWII soundbite ‘To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’ is of course coloured by the bitter experiences of these years. Adorno later retracted his dictum, admiting that traumatic experience had as much right to expression after the Holocaust as before - if not more…____________

Ben Shahn picked up the art of photography from Walker Evans…

Above - one of the shots Shahn took during a two- or three-month trip through the South and Midwest in the fall of 1935…

Ben Shahn: …and Know the Gestures with which the Little Flowers open in the Morning, from the Rilke Portfolio, “For the Sake of a Single Verse”, 1968 - color lithograph on paper (Smithsonian)

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Louis MacNeice (Sept. 12, 1907 - 1963), poet - born in Ireland but spent most of his life in England: Oxford, Birmingham, London…

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Louis MacNeise: Sunday Morning

Down the road someone is practising scales,The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,Man’s heart expands to tinker with his carFor this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,Take corners on two wheels until you go so fastThat you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of timeA small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spireOpen its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tireTo tell how there is no music or movement which securesEscape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.__________________________

Stanislaw Lem, Polish science fiction writer and critic was born Sep. 12, 1921 (d. 2006). Lem has been translated into English and 40 other languages, and his novels and stories have also supplied material for films such as Solaris (whether by Tarkovsky or by Soderbergh)…

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.” — Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

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Michael Ondaatje, important Sri Lanka-born Canadian novelist and poet, is 68 today. His main success was The English Patient, 1992…

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Speaking to You (From Rock Bottom)

Speaking to youthis hourthese days whenI have lost the feather of poetryand the rainsof separationsurround us tocktock like Go tablets

American author Sherwood Anderson, often regarded as one of the lesser prose modernists: Sep. 13, 1876 - 1941…

“You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.” — Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)

Ekelöf flirted with surrealism in his first poetry collections in the 1930s and translated much French poetry. Later he took a turn in a more Romantic direction and found a greater audience… His last works (a 1960s trilogy of collections) were coloured by Oriental mysticism and used a prophetic idiom.

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Gunnar Ekelöf: A poem from Partitur

A bowl of eyesI leave to autumnYes, a bowl fullof the unseenFor I have been grantedto see

The faces of the dead and the livingHuman insufficiencyand the one thing neededBut of thatI am forbiddento speak

I stand in Epicurus’ gardenThere the laurel is in bloomAnd the high godsare endlessly remote

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Jean Renoir (Sep. 15, 1894 - 1979), son of great painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was a filmmaker, writer and actor - best known for The Great Illusion (La Grande Illusion, 1937)

As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s - living a transatlantic life for the greater part of his career, directing films in both France and the US.

Photo: Richard Avedon

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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (Sep. 15, 1890 - 1976) has sold approx. 4 billion copies of her novels - so in theory two out of every three inhabitants of planet Earth could own their own private Miss Marple or Poirot mystery…

“Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.” ― Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia

Photo: Godfrey Argent, February 1969 - bromide print (NPG, London)

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Fay Wray - American actress: Sep. 15, 1907 - 2004…

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Celebrating Pierre Gassmann (Sep. 15, 1913 - 2004), the excellent printer whose work allows us to still appreciate the photos of Man Ray…

The feet of morning the feet of noon and the feet of evening walk ceaselessly round pickled buttocks on the other hand the feet of midnight remain motionless in their echo-woven baskets

consequently the lion is a diamond

on the sofas made of breadare seated the dressed and the undressedthe undressed hold leaden swallows between their toesthe dressed hold leaden nests between their fingersat all hours the undressed get dressed againand the dressed get undressedand exchange the leaden swallowsfor the leaden nests

consequently the tail is an umbrella

a mouth opens within another mouthand within this mouth another mouthand within this mouth another mouthand so on without endit is a sad perspectivewhich adds an I-don’t-know-whatto another I-don’t-know-what

consequently the grasshopper is a column

the pianos with heads and tailsplace pianos with heads and tailson their heads and their tails

PS: He received the Nobel “for his deep understanding of his country’s peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature…”

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Ken Kesey, counterculture hero and author of One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion: Sep. 17, 1935 - 2001…

Kesey about his peers, past and present:

“Kerouac had lots of class—stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself. If there is a bad guy, it’s poor old drunk Jack, stumbling around. You never hear him railing at the government or railing at this or that. He likes trains, people, bums, cars. He just paints a wonderful picture of Norman Rockwell’s world. Of course it’s Norman Rockwell on a lot of dope.

Jack London had class. He wasn’t a very good writer, but he had tremendous class. And nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.” — “Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136” by Robert Faggen, in The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994)

Photo: Still from the film Magic Trip

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Birthday also of Mrs. Robinson - a.k.a. Anne Bancroft (Sep. 17, 1931 - 2005), perhaps best known for her turn as the voracious seductress of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate…

Williams was friends with members of the avant-garde such as Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1915 Williams began to be associated with a group of New York artists and writers known as “The Others.” Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and by Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Duchamp. Through these involvements Williams got to know the Dadaist movement, which may explain the influence on his earlier poems of Dadaist and Surrealist principles. His involvement with The Others made Williams a key member of the early modernist movement in America…

Williams’ magnum opus is Paterson, a poem composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book is considered to be Williams’ epic attempt at a rewritten American history.

While writing the poem, Williams struggled to find ways to incorporate the real world facts obtained through his research into the poem. On a worksheet for the poem, he wrote, “Make it factual (as the Life is factual-almost casual-always sensual-usually visual: related to thought)”. Williams considered, but ultimately rejected, putting footnotes into the work describing some facts. Still, the style of the poem allowed for many opportunities to incorporate ‘factual information’, including portions of his own correspondence with the American poet Marcia Nardi and fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg…

Photo of Williams at the 92th Street Y, 1954

William Carlos Williams goes to Paris - excerpt from “Père Sebastian Rasles”, In the American Grain (1956)

William Carlos Williams: It Is A Living Coral

a trouble

archaically fetteredto produce

E Pluribus Unum anisland

in the sea a Capitolsurmounted

by Armed Liberty—painting

sculpture straddled bya dome

eight million poundsin weight

iron plates constructedto expand

and contract withvariations

of temperaturethe folding

and unfolding of a lily.And Congress

authorized and theCommission

was entrusted wasentrusted!

a sculptured groupMars

in Roman mail placinga wreath

of laurel on the browof Washington

Commerce MinervaThomas

Jefferson John Hancockat

the table Mrs. Mottepresenting

Indian burning arrowsto Generals

Marion and Lee to fireher mansion

and dislodge the British—this scaleless

jumble is superb

and accurate in itsexpression

of the thing theywould destroy—

Baptism of Poca-hontas

with a little cardhanging

under it to tellthe persons

in the picture.

It climbs

it runs, it is Geo.Shoup

of Idaho it wearsa beard

it fetches nakedIndian

women from a riverTrumbull

Varnum HendersonFrances

Willard’s corset isabsurd—

Banks White Columbusstretched

in bed men felling trees

The Hon. MichaelC. Kerr

onetime Speaker ofthe House

of RepresentativesPerry

in a rowboat on LakeErie

changing ships thedead

among the wreckagesickly green

John Chapman’s Baptism of Pocahontas at Jamestown, Virginia, completed in 1840, hangs in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol - WCW’s “Living Coral”…

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Oscar Dominguez: The Freud card from the Tarot de Marseilles deck designed by the Surrealists waiting for passage out of occupied France in the winter of 1940/1…

“In 1939 Breton was mobilized as a doctor, and attended a school for pilots in Poitiers. Peret had joined his regiment, but would soon be imprisoned in Rennes for anti-military Trotskyist propaganda within the army … At the time of the armistice, and exodus, Ernst and Bellmer being German were taken to Le Camp des Milles. The other Surrealists met at the Air-Bel residence near Marseilles (in the “Free Zone”) after their discharge. They would remain housed there during the winter of 1940-41, taken care of by an American committee for aid to intellectuals, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Herold, Lam, Masson, Peret would kill time by playing cards — Tarot, “the Game of Marseille.” — From Surrealism by Rene Passeron

Freud is The Mage (Jack) of Stars in this deck - The Sirène (Queen) and Génie (King) of the same suit of Dark Stars were Alice and Lautréamont respectively…

The ashes which are the cigar’s maladyimitate the concierges rushing down the stairsafter their broom that fell from the fifth floorkilled the gasmanthat employee resembling a bug in a saladThe bird lies in wait for a bug and it’s the broom that got you gasmanYour wife’s hair will be white as sugarand her ears will be unpaid billsunpaid because you are deadBut why didn’t this gasman have feet shaped like a threewhy didn’t he have the lucid look of a glovestorewhy didn’t he have his mother’s dried-up breast hanging from his bellywhy didn’t he have flies in the pockets of his jacketHe would have passed away damp and cold like a smashed porcelain vaseand his hands would have caressed the bars of his prisonBut the sun in his pocket had put on its cap

Oscar Dominguez: The Freud card from the Tarot de Marseilles deck designed by the Surrealists waiting for passage out of occupied France in the winter of 1940/1…

“In 1939 Breton was mobilized as a doctor, and attended a school for pilots in Poitiers. Peret had joined his regiment, but would soon be imprisoned in Rennes for anti-military Trotskyist propaganda within the army … At the time of the armistice, and exodus, Ernst and Bellmer being German were taken to Le Camp des Milles. The other Surrealists met at the Air-Bel residence near Marseilles (in the “Free Zone”) after their discharge. They would remain housed there during the winter of 1940-41, taken care of by an American committee for aid to intellectuals, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Herold, Lam, Masson, Peret would kill time by playing cards — Tarot, “the Game of Marseille.” — From Surrealism by Rene Passeron

Freud is The Mage (Jack) of Stars in this deck - The Sirène (Queen) and Génie (King) of the same suit of Dark Stars were Alice and Lautréamont respectively…

Today we celebrate Greta Garbo (Sep. 18, 1905 – 1990), the Swedish enigma - a hat-model made good she became one of the highest paid stars of the early talkies era, only to retire at age 36 in 1941, preferring to lead a secluded life in her N.Y. apartment…